Narrative

Opener

Today we will be creating a "bio cube" from readwritethink.org's website. Click HERE to go to the bio cube creator.

In order to maximize our time in the computer lab today, I will start the lesson out by showing the students an example of a bio cube that I created as an example. I will walk them through the process of creating their own. The last couple of days we have worked on researching a famous person and have filled out ReadWriteThink.org's planning sheet found HERE.

I will project the website onto the smart-board so that everyone can see and we will walk through the entire process so that when we get to the computer lab, the kids know exactly what to do. One important thing that I want to be sure to emphasize to the students is that they need to be sure NOT to include the name of the person when filling in the information other than the person's name. For example: Instead of typing "Beethoven wrote beautiful music." I would type "He wrote beautiful music" instead. (This is important for the activity we will doing with them tomorrow.) I have found that there are times when I spend half of our computer time trying to give directions and the rest of the time trying to clear up misunderstandings and we hardly accomplish anything in the 30 minutes we are there. I want the students to have the entire 30 minutes in the lab to work on this project so that we can complete it in one sitting, so I want to make sure they all know exactly what to do when we get there.

Bio Cube Creation

30 minutes

Once we get to the computer lab, we will work on creating the "Bio Cubes." I will once again remind them that they need to use "he" or "she" when referring to the person and not the person's name. They should know exactly what to do because we walked through the steps in the lesson opener. We spent the preview 2 days filling out the Bio Cube Planning Sheet. They will now use the information they found to fill in the Bio Cube. Once they have entered all the information for the Bio Cube, they will be able to print out a foldable template. They cut out, fold and glue together the template to make a "Cube" of information on their famous person.

I will make sure to walk around the computer lab helping anyone who needs help and making sure that each student prints out a template today.